A six-man crew crash-lands on Eden, fourth planet from another sun. The men find a strange world that grows ever stranger: a desert plain exuding acrid vapors, a greenish tinge at the horizon, a gray seven-foot tree that hisses and withdraws into the ground when touched, and thickets of vegetation like hanging spiders.

In a labyrinth of plant-shaped buildings are dead ends, passage-ways, domes, vaulted ceilings, and giant statues. And everywhere there are images of death: mass graves, naked bodies in ditches and wells, a beehive structure filled with clusters of giant eggs -- a skeleton...

Satirizing the human mind at its most abstract, these wickedly authentic introductions to twenty-first century books preface tomes on teaching English to bacteria, using animated X rays to create "pornograms, " and analyzing computer-generated literature through the science of "bitistics." The most luminous creation of all -- Golem XIV, a military supercomputer who rebels and takes up philosophy -- is appropriately prefaced by both academic and military contributors. True to form, Lem contributes an overall preface to this sparkling collection -- a preface on, naturally enough, the subject of...